Friday, April 13, 2012

Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?

Ran across this article a few years back, and happily I saved a copy as the link is no longer good and I couldn't find it on their site. From over the pond in Britain:

From The TimesSeptember 8, 2007

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?

British attitudes are supercilious and misguided

Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselveson our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killingspree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benightedcolonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, thatAmericans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeedgenerally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 studentswere shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last yearsuccessfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed thecarrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measureof bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of theUniversity of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Lawsthat forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neitherinclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make thingsworse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve ratherto encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may beattacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault onVirginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lostbefore a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only bythe law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and itsfellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans.One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of thestrictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down toVermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence(one thirteenth that of Britain).

Serious gun crime is concentrated in particular parts of England;internationally, the country has a low death rate from guns

Background

* Factfile: teenagers gunned down across UK

* Three murders in four days in South London

* We Shall Overcome, protesters sing at peace vigil

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience:whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of morerestrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess afirearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years allviolent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread oflaws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens.Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states thathad followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction inrapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau ofJustice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailablyentrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime VictimsSurvey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we nowsuffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the UnitedStates; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over thepast decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all thelegal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, andso dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that withinliving memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, ormachinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets ofLondon with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinaryVictorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate fatherfastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he gotdressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where onlyone of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909,policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by(and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuitof two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now areshocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns inthe street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armedrobbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World Waramounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was notsimply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain wasrocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost andtroops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers,Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britainthen arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In thatunstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was notinflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters ofall applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armedrobbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than twodozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, wesuffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with afreer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim tocrimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute:crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those whohave never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

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Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences. - C.S. Lewis

Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave. - Capt. Mal

A Rifleman’s Prayer:Oh Lord, I would live my life in freedom, peace and happiness, enjoying the simple pleasures of hearth and home. I would die an old, old man in my own bed, preferably of sexual overexertion.

But if that is not to be, Lord, if monsters such as this should find their way to my little corner of the world on my watch, then help me to sweep those bastards from the ramparts, because doing that is good, and right, and just.

And if in this I should fall, let me be found atop a pile of brass, behind the wall I made of their corpses. Geek with a .45

"He's Black Council,", I said.

"Or maybe stupid," Ebenezar countered.

I thought about it. "Not sure which is scarier."

Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. "Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid's everywhere, every day." Ebenezar McCoy

“A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition” ― Rudyard Kipling